In an unprecedented fit of Being Prepared (don’t expect one again soon), I thought I might just make me a breakfast smoothie the night before.

When stopping by the supermarket after work, I noticed the cherries were marked down, and thought they’d make for a nice smoothie. Since they didn’t look like they’d last that long, I figured I’d best make that smoothie on the day of purchase. While I’m not strict about keeping breakfast foods specifically for breakfast, or even labelling certain foods as strictly “breakfast”, “lunch”, “dinner”, or “snack”, I thought the smoothie would make a better breakfast than desert/random snack.
Besides, I wasn’t particularly peckish.

Anyway, here are the ingredients:

Because cherries are so nice and red, I thought I’d better not muck that up by chucking in some spirulina tablets. I also made sure to not use too much soymilk. I did sprinkle in the probiotic powder, though.

Just after blending:

It turned a very nice pink, darker than the smoothies I make using berries.

Here’s what it looked like in the morning:

Like the previous time I used probiotic powder, the smoothie acquired a thick bubbly layer, which you can see in the picture. No pancake batter-smell, though. It didn’t taste as cherry-ish as I’d hoped and some of the pink prettiness had gone, but it was still a good smoothie. And preparing breakfast the day before is really quite convenient…
Next time I might try something cherry without the white powder, though.

One, my SIGG bottle seems to have reverted to it’s leaky state again, which is confusing. If I have it closed and suck out some water from the leak (yes, it’s possible. And weird. But possible. Yet weird. And kind of icky), it won’t leak while in my bag, but as soon as I open it up again the leakiness starts again.
And this time it seems to actually flow, when before, it was just this one slow drop.

I think I have a vague grasp of the basic physics behind the sometimes-leakiness, so that bit doesn’t surprise me too much, but I still don’t get why it goes from leaky to not leaky to (more selectively) leaky again.
Looks like it’s really time to get me a new one, though…

Two, I have that “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)” feature going, which seems like a nice way of stumbling across similar and possibly interesting posts.
However, the few posts I checked were either not at all related, like the Holocaust train one mentioned below, or only sort of related but not particularly interesting (though to be fair, I only clicked, like, five of them). Those kind of related ones were usually not actually any kind of similar to my post. Just a vaguely similar basic topic (smoothie, festival, vegetables) that make it so I can at least sort of get where it’s coming from with the automated generation but still don’t make it actually related.

Also, it only seems to work half the time. The post about me visiting my grandparents had a post about some Holocaust train reaching Auschwitz as a possibly related post (Yeah, I’m still confused what made the automated generator give me that, though at least after actually reading it the post’s title no longer confuses me about the times we’re living in. The only connection I can think of is that park where I hung out. Some Jews spent part of the war there and it had some monument about that. I’m pretty sure I made no mention of that in my post, though. Anyway), but when I click on that post now, I only get that link about half the time.
Strange…

Since I still occasionally think of that carob-banana smoothie, I thought I’d prepare me some sort of approximation of it since I still don’t actually have the proper ingredients.
However, I now have spirulina (tablets, not powder, but they’re no match for my trusty immersion blender), and if carob subs for cocoa, cocoa can sub for carob.

Ingredients:

This is the first time I added some kind of sweetener to a smoothie. I think I also put some good old flax seeds in it, but forgot to put them in the picture.

Smoothie:

At first the colour was a little greenish, so I added some more cocoa. It still had this slight spirulina taste, but that’s okay. The chocolate flavour wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped, but it was still pretty damn good.
I still want to try me that carob one, though.

With all this smoothie talk, I’ve been wondering. When do you go from smoothie to shake? I’m not 100% sure, but it is possible I may have actually had an official MacDonalds milkshake at some point, way back when I still occasionally ate there. And what I have here? That’s the kind of thing I tend to see as a milkshake. Of course, McDo’s only had the chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla option, and anything not very, very fruity kind of feels more like that than a smoothie, but still. I’m so confused.

Today we had the Dunya festival (Dutch site) here in Rotterdam, a free festival with lots of world music. Mostly by artists I’ve not heard of before and will likely not hear much from again (though I do intend to remember Daby Touré), but that doesn’t mean it’s not good fun.

While I generally feel food at festivals is somewhat overpriced (but then I generally think that of prepared food), there is generally at least some vegan stuff on offer here and I usually end up buying some snacks even though you usually spent a lot more time waiting for your turn than actually eating the food.

This year’s loot:

Churros:

Bara:

Churros is a Spanish snack. Basically it’s fried dough with something sweet (sugar, cinnamon sugar, some kind of syrup) or possibly savoury on it. I’ve had them before, since I find random vegan snacks hard to resist at times, but I’m always vaguely disappointed. It’s nice enough, I suppose, but I don’t really have that much of a sweet tooth and after eating one or two bits, it simply becomes more bland sugary food. Which I figured out pretty quickly, but I still occasionally cave when I see a churros stand.

The bara was much more enjoyable, though. It’s a savoury snack from Suriname, also fried. And the ones you get here are properly fresh and crispy, not that soggy, dense microwaved nonsense you get at some surifood places.
Next time I see a churros stand, I’ll promise myself two baras if I can walk past it. One bag of churros is almost the same price of two baras, anyway.

As it was a free festival with a fair bit of sponsoring and ideological and governmental stands trying to educate the public about a whole bunch of very important issues, there were some people handing out free stuff and asking the public to sign petitions. I avoided the petitions (unless they specifically tell me what they intend to do with them, they always seem like a waste of paper to me) and most of the pointless freebies, but still managed to get me a zip-loc baggie containing condoms, safe sex booklets, and a lollipop from the nice people at the local GGD stand and a bag with posters from a nice woman from a local anti-discrimination foundation. (Dutch site)
Now I just have to find places to hang the posters…

For some more good news, the leak in my SIGG bottle seems to have fixed itself after all. I have no idea why it took so much longer this time, but I’m very happy about it.

ETA: Because I really did like Daby Touré, I figured I might as well share some.

A few days ago I bought some pre-cut/washed/prepare/whatever stir-fry veg which really needed eating. I kept putting it off for very important reasons I completely forgot, but in the end I made some anyway because if I hadn’t, the veg would’ve gone bad.

The veg along with all the other stuff I used:

I made sure to chuck in the seitan since I have some vague plans of trying a short-term gluten-free project in the near future. Or at least wheat-free, I might still use me some oatmeal (or is that also gluten-free?). There are no health reasons for me to do so, and I do generally quite like wheat-based things, but I would like to try going without for a while. Partly to see if it makes any kind of difference to my general well-being, and partly just because it seems like an interesting challenge.
Though if I buy any of the bread, it’d better have more flavour than the stuff they briefly had at a restaurant where I used to work years ago when they had a coeliac customer. That stuff was vile.

Anyway, back to the more current food. It’s kind of like thebami I made some time ago except not really. Well, the method of preparation is pretty much the same (except that this time I accidentally burned bits), but the result had a very different taste due to the different veg and spices used.

Not-bami:

It was quite nice, and quite different from what I expected. As I only used half the pre-prepared veg and froze the leftover half, I might just try and make it again. Provided I still have some pepper left, at least.